Let me get this out of the way up front: Perl isn’t a beautiful language. It’s kind of a mongrel pup with pedigreed academic roots: C, AWK, Lisp, Pascal, sed, and a bit of Smalltalk and C++ tossed in ...

The trends shown in the graph continue: the Thompson NFA handles a 100-character string in under 200 microseconds, while Perl would require over 1015 years. (Perl is only the most conspicuous example ...